


дом

by Waldo



Category: NCIS: Los Angeles
Genre: Angst, Award Nominees, Episode Related, Episode: s01e07 Pushback, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waldo/pseuds/Waldo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been two months since the events in "Pushback" and Sam notices that G's been acting a little bit off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	дом

They were half way through their fourth hour of stakeout when Sam's patience finally snapped.

"What is that?" he asked G. G had been turning the damn thing over and over in his hands all day.

"A key," G said like he was talking to someone too dim to have figured it out for himself. He held it up for Sam to see.

Sam gave him a level glare. He was severely regretting the day he thought it would be entertaining to see how hard G would poke the bear before it snapped at him when they had stakeouts. Now G thought aggravating him was a good way to pass the time. He sighed before wrinkling up his forehead as he evaluated the small metal key. "You found a hotel that still uses keys?"

"It's not a hotel key," G said. Suddenly his face was closed off and he quickly shoved the key into the front pocket of his jeans.

Now Sam was curious. He knew G's car keys and handcuff key were on a plain metal ring. And his car key had the door release button at the top. This was a simple key, not on any kind of ring. "What's it a key to, G?"

"It's a house key," Callen answered, now slumped in his seat, his eyes focused on the park across the street from the car.

"A house key?" Sam repeated. "You found a house? Last week I couldn't even get you to look at an apartment."

"'Cause I was busy trying to get the details of this house sorted out," G said without looking at Sam.

"You're serious," Sam said suddenly. "You bought a house?"

"Not exactly."

"Renting?"

"No, it's mine."

"G... can we skip the word games? This is serious. You got a house?"

Callen stared out the window for a few more seconds before turning to look Sam in the eye. "It was Alina Rostoff's house."

"The Russian girl? The one who used to be your foster sister?" Sam was amazed that G was able to blindside him so thoroughly with this.

"Yep. Long complicated story, but I found a lawyer and Arkady Kolcheck sent me these pictures... anyway, I was able to make a case to get the house signed over to me since Alina didn't leave it to anyone."

"You're serious?" Sam said again. They'd closed both Alina's and Callen's cases over two months ago. "You've been working on this for two months and you didn't tell me?"

G shrugged. "I've gotten used to doing things on my own, Sam."

Sam sighed. He really should have expected that kind of response from G. He knew Callen was getting better about trusting others to be there for him, but he was still very much a work in progress. "Don't have to, you know," Sam said before turning back to watch the house their idiot Lieutenant was in. He was careful to keep his tone in check, to make it a reminder not a reprimand. He wasn't surprised when G didn't answer him.

There was a long silence before something nagged at Sam enough for him to open up the conversation again. "Didn't I drop you off at hotel last night?"

"Uh-huh," G told him.

"But if you've got a house -"

"The key was dropped off this morning," Callen cut him off.

"Oh. Once we grab this idiot and get him processed, I could come over. See the place," Sam suggested. He wasn't sure if G would take him up on the offer. If he was going to talk about his childhood, he was more likely to do it with Sam than anyone. But far more likely than that, he wasn't going to talk about it. Wasn't going to share. He wasn't sure if G would be up to sharing this yet.

"Sure. If you want. My duffle is in my trunk. I haven't even been over there since the day we closed the case, so, you know... it's not..." G shrugged not even sure what he was trying to say.

Sam was even more convinced that it would be a good idea for someone to be there while G deliberately dug up old ghosts. "Well, on the way over I can introduce you to this modern marvel called the grocery store. Now that you have a kitchen, you'll have to learn to cook."

"I know how to cook. I had a whole apartment in Venice before I got shot, remember?"

"You're still going to need groceries."

"Fair point."

Sam shifted around until he could reach the bag of candy in the pocket of the back of his seat. He dropped it between the two of them and fished out a piece of gum. As he folded the wrapper into a little origami frog, he watched G out of the corner of his eye. "Can I ask you something?"

"When you think you need to preface a question, I start to worry." G took the little silver frog from Sam's side of the dashboard and put it on his and tapped on the back to make it hop.

"After you got shot, why didn't you just get a new place? I mean, in the three years I've known you, you've never stayed in a place too long, but you've had _a_ place. After you got shot, you couldn't stay in the same place for more than three or four nights."

"Couldn't shake the feeling that I was still being stalked. We still didn't know who shot me... Didn't know where I wanted to be." G shrugged and dug around in the bag until he found a sucker. He pulled off the wrapper and handed it to Sam. "If this ends up being like the Miller stake out last year," he said apropos of nothing, "we'll end up with a whole menagerie again."

Sam looked up from where he was flattening the wrapper against the steering wheel and smiled. Sometimes G could have the oddest ways of letting him know that they were okay.

 

They did stop at the grocery store once they'd nailed their suspect and processed the paperwork. A service had come in and cleaned out the kitchen and dusted, but nothing else had been touched in over two months. Sam was a little amazed at how easily G moved around the kitchen, knowing where the plates would be and which drawer was the silverware drawer and which cabinets would be empty now that the service had cleaned out the food that Alina had left. Sam had eventually just started handing groceries to G and letting him put them where he wanted them.

Once that was done, G wandered down the hall, looking a little shell-shocked. As if it were settling in that this house was his now. That one of the few sets of foster parents he'd had who'd treated him well were gone; that the one little girl who'd called him 'brother' was dead. Sam knew that G was holding himself at least partially responsible for that.

Sam watched him walk down the hall to the last room and disappear into it. When the door didn't shut between them, Sam followed.

G was sitting on a double bed, made up with a flowers and vines bedspread. The room was pretty utilitarian, cheap art on the walls, a reading lamp fixed over the bed. A dresser and desk were on the opposite walls.

"You okay?" Sam asked, leaning on the doorjamb.

"Just trying to wrap my brain around all this."

Sam came in and sat next to him on the bed. "Was this your room?" He suspected there was a master bedroom somewhere, this room was clearly too small to be it, but G had come here on instinct.

Callen reached over and opened the closet door.

Sam's eyebrows shot up at the sight of the door's edge. "G. Callen '83," he read aloud. "Guess that answers that question."

"Started doing it when I was twelve and my junior high counselor thought it was a good idea to put me in shop class. I pocketed a screwdriver one day and ..." He stopped for a second to collect his thoughts, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I'd had a fight with my foster mom one night because I wanted to put up a poster on the wall. I was basically told that I wouldn't be there that long and they didn't want thumbtack holes or tape marks on the wall. So the next day at school I took the screwdriver, came home and carved my name in the wall."

Sam wasn't sure if he should laugh or cry. That sounded exactly like something he'd expect from G. And mostly that made him sad.

"Between getting in trouble at school for taking the screwdriver in the first place - I think they thought I'd planned to stab someone with it or something - and then doing all that damage to the wall… I was sent packing the next day."

Sam glanced over and shook his head trying to figure out how any adult could sanction kicking a kid out over being a pissed off kid. "When I was sixteen I got in a knock-down dragged-out fight with my mom's boyfriend, who I couldn't stand. At one point I went to hit him, but he stepped out of the way and I ended up putting my fist through the drywall of the apartment. My mom made me take my Christmas money down to the hardware store to buy the stuff I needed to fix the hole. Then she made me spend the night of the big school rivalry basketball game sitting in the library learning how to patch the wall correctly and the weekend actually patching it."

He wasn't sure if telling his own stories would make G more likely to open up or just make him feel worse that he got bounced from place to place when he screwed up instead of simply being told to fix his mistakes.

G smiled at him. "I can totally see that. The wall was flawless when you were done, wasn't it?"

Sam smiled at the memory. "After the second time I patched it. First time didn't pass muster by my mom. She made me do it over."

G began tracing the gouges in the door with his finger. "After that one disaster, I just got it into my head that I liked the idea of leaving a mark wherever I stayed. I chose my places a little more carefully, where they'd be a little less obvious..." He brushed the dust out of the grooves and then closed the door again before flopping back on the bed.

Sam went around the other side of the bed and nudged G's shoulder. "Shove over."

G shifted to put his head on the pillow, not particularly worried about having his shoes on the bedspread. Sam lay down next to him, their arms touching, both of them staring at the ceiling.

"Mrs. Rostoff let me put up posters and stuff. I didn't for a few weeks; I'd learned not to ask. She finally asked me if I wanted to and I told her that I doubted I'd be there long enough to make it worth the paint job."

Sam looked over at him; sure the story wasn't over. "And?"

"And then I came home from school the next day and Alina had drawn me like, half a dozen pictures that she wanted me to put up. So I figured if I was going to have tape all over the walls from her pictures, I might was well put up some of the stuff I'd cut out of magazines." G shrugged against Sam's shoulder.

"How long were you here?" Sam asked. It was the one thing they never really talked about - how often G had changed homes.

"Three months. I almost wasn't here at all. The Rostoff's had been taking in foster kids while they tried to adopt. They were on the list and they got a call just a few months after they'd adopted Alina from Moscow. They were apparently well-known for taking in teenagers that were... difficult. So even though they'd just gotten their own kid they said they'd take me as soon as -" G cut himself off.

Sam shifted to look at him. "As soon as what, G?" Callen crossed his arms over his chest, and Sam wondered if they'd abruptly reached the end of G's sudden bout of sharing.

"...as soon as I got out of juvie," he finally finished.

"Well, that sure as hell wasn't what I expected you to say." Sam wasn't sure what else he could say.

"Six weeks for drug possession. Basically I was foster kid caught with a dime bag in my jacket at school. They didn't know what else to do with me. The family I was with at the time was fed up with me. I didn't think they'd find anyone else to take me, and I kind of hoped they wouldn't. The group homes sucked, but in my head staying somewhere that sucked was better than being moved from place to place _hoping_ the next place didn't suck."

"But the Rostoffs took you?" Sam asked, now watching G intently.

Callen continued to study the ceiling. "Yep. They picked me up from the detention center, so... it wasn't like they didn't know what they were getting. I got a pretty strong lecture on the way … here… about how they wouldn't put up for having drugs in a house with a preschooler, but as long as I remembered that they wouldn't harp on one mistake."

"Sounds like a lucky break." Sam had always had the natural curiosity that came with knowing that G had the kind of background that he did. And Sam prided himself on the fact that was probably one of two people in the world G felt at all comfortable discussing the details with. But now he was caught between wanting to push while G felt like sharing and really not wanting to know how the system had screwed him over time and time again. In hindsight, it was a little easier not to be pissed at the world on G's behalf when everything was in the abstract.

"For three months it was. They were amazed to find out that I was a good student. And that I was perfectly happy to read to Alina and help her work on her English. She taught me Russian... well, as much as a four-year-old knows. But the Rostoff's helped too. I mean, they were able to adopt her because they were transplants themselves, so Alina wasn't going into a home where she couldn't be understood... you know?"

Sam nodded, even though really he didn't know at all. "So how come you only stayed for three months?"

G scowled at the ceiling. "I dug my own hole."

Sam just continued to watch him until G felt up to explaining. "Mrs. Rostoff was diagnosed with breast cancer about a month and a half after I got here. At first I thought it would be okay, I'd make myself useful helping with Alina while her mom was in the hospital and stuff, but as I began to get nervous that I'd be just one more thing for them to hassle with on top of everything, some of my bad habits started to re-emerge."

"You start smoking dope again?" Sam asked.

"No. No, they'd warned me that that was a quick ticket out. But I did try to beat the crap out of anyone who even looked at me sideways. After the third or fourth time I got suspended and Mr. Rostoff got called away from work to pick me up…" Callen shrugged again.

Sam wasn't sure what to say. Maybe it was just that things were different more than twenty years later, but he had no problems seeing how most of the stupid stuff G admitted to doing as a kid was clearly just a child crying out for attention. So if he could see it, why couldn't a parade of social workers and caseworkers and psychologists?

"I had a pretty good track record of finding a way to get myself pulled out of a home before they could kick me out."

"That sucks, G," Sam said succinctly.

Callen shrugged again. "I did it to myself."

"Yeah, but where were the adults who were supposed to keep you from doing that kind of crap to yourself? I mean, I had my own ways of self-destructing as a kid. My mom had some very creative and very unpleasant ways of making damn sure I didn't do the same stupid thing twice. And not because I was afraid of her, but because she made damn sure I knew why what I'd done was so stupid."

"Well, sure, she's your mom. That's what moms do."

Sam decided to just shut up. He was feeling protective and pissed off and he wasn't sure Callen needed either at this point. "Sorry, G."

"You didn't do anything wrong. Look," G said, finally turning so that he was looking at Sam across the small bed. "If anything pisses me off it's people apologizing that their life didn't suck as bad as mine. I'm tough. I survived the childhood from hell and still managed to come out of it reasonably sane. But I wouldn't wish what happened to me on anyone. So just… don't apologize. If I didn't want to talk about it, I wouldn't. You know me that well by now."

Sam nodded, rolling G's words over in his head. After a minute he reached over and threaded his fingers through G's and squeezed his hand. "I may not always get it, and I may not always know what to say, but you can always talk to me, G."

G squeezed back. "I know. Always have. I know Nate's seen my file - even the bits he's not supposed to have access to - but I can tell you that even with that, you already know ten times more than he does. And you always find the right thing to say. Nate would never just let me ramble like that and then say 'that sucks'. He'd want to talk around it for an hour until I somehow b-s'ed him into thinking I've made some kind of peace with it or some dumbass thing like that. But it did suck. And it's over. So let's call a spade a spade and move on."

Sam quirked a small smile at G. He knew when he was being asked - subtly - to change the subject. That they'd dwelled on the heavy stuff for long enough. "Or in this case, move in. I should get Kensi to organize a housewarming party for you."

"Do not do that," G warned.

"We can all bring, I don't know, mixing bowls or toasters or something -"

"Do not," G warned again, but the smile on his face made Sam think that G just might like being fussed over for a while. Maybe after G had had a few weeks to make the place his own and get comfortable here.

"Nate can come over and psychoanalyze your DVD collection or whatever. Ooh, we can get a surround sound system for that decent looking t.v. I saw in the other room and we can talk Eric and Dom into setting it up." He filed that away as a definite possibility.

"Can we at least wait until I get the utilities transferred into my name?" G asked, caving.

"I suppose," Sam said magnanimously.

G shook his head at Sam's antics and then got suddenly very serious again. "Hey Sam?"

"Yeah, G?"

"You want to, uh... you want to crash here tonight? I got the stuff to make tacos. And we have beer..."

Sam smiled indulgently at G. Zero to sixty and back again. But after three years he didn't expect much else. And he wasn't surprised that G wasn't all that keen on being alone his first night in a house full of ghosts. "Well, if you're going to attempt to cook, I'm going to have to stick around to see that." After all, he'd just that afternoon reminded G that he didn't have to go through the rough stuff on his own. He had friends he could count on, who'd be there when he needed them to be.

G let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. "Your bag in the car, or am I going to have to see if there's a new toothbrush somewhere around here?"

"It's in the trunk. You go follow through on that threat to make dinner and I'll go get it."

"My cooking is perfectly good!" G countered as he headed for the door.

"I'll believe it when I eat it," Sam told him as he rolled off the bed and fished his car key out of his pocket.

G flipped Sam the bird as he headed back into the kitchen. He felt exhausted and relieved in equal measure. It was good to be able to talk to someone who never judged and didn't try to fix either him or the situation. He blew out a long breath and stretched his arms and back as he walked to the fridge. He was surprised how much he felt like someone had literally taken a weight off his shoulders.

He opened the fridge and began tossing things onto the counter. Now it was time make Sam eat his words.


End file.
